DECREE ON THE DISSOLUTION OF THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY

[19 (6) January 1918]

From the very beginning, the Russian Revolution has put forward the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies as a mass organization of all the toiling and exploited classes, the only one capable of directing the struggle of these classes for their complete political and economic liberation.

Throughout the entire first period of the Russian Revolution, the Soviets multiplied, grew, and strengthened, overcoming through their own experience the illusions of reconciliation with the bourgeoisie, the deceptiveness of the forms of bourgeois-democratic parliamentarism, arriving at the practical conclusion that the liberation of the oppressed classes was impossible without a break with these forms and with any kind of conciliationism. Such a break was effected by the October Revolution, which transferred all power into the hands of the Soviets.

The elections to the Constituent Assembly, which was supposed to become the crown jewel of the bourgeois-parliamentary republic, were conducted according to party lists that had been drawn up precisely before the October Revolution, when the party that had the support of the vast majority of the peasants — the party of Socialist-Revolutionaries — had not yet so fully revealed its essence, its true political nature, that it could unite in itself both purely bourgeois right Socialist-Revolutionaries and genuine socialist left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Conflict between the Constituent Assembly and Soviet power was, due to these circumstances, inevitable in a particularly acute form.

The Constituent Assembly, elected according to lists drawn up before the October Revolution, was an expression of the old correlation of political forces, when the conciliators and Cadets held power. At that time, the people could not, voting for candidates of the Socialist-Revolutionary party, make a choice between the right Socialist-Revolutionaries, supporters of the bourgeoisie, and the left, supporters of socialism. Thus the Constituent Assembly, which was supposed to be the crown jewel of the bourgeois parliamentary republic, could not but stand in the way of the October Revolution and Soviet power.

The October Revolution, having given power to the Soviets and through the Soviets to the toiling and exploited classes, provoked desperate resistance from the exploiters, and in suppressing this resistance fully revealed itself as the beginning of the socialist revolution. The toiling classes were forced to become convinced through experience that the old bourgeois parliamentarism had outlived itself, that it was completely incompatible with the tasks of implementing socialism, that not general-national but only class institutions (such as the Soviets) were capable of overcoming the resistance of the propertied classes and laying the foundations of a socialist society. Any renunciation of the full power of the Soviets, of the Soviet republic conquered by the people, in favor of bourgeois parliamentarism and the Constituent Assembly would now be a step backward and the collapse of the entire October workers' and peasants' revolution.

The Constituent Assembly that convened on January 5th, due to the circumstances set forth above, gave a majority to the party of right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the party of Kerensky, Avksentiev and Chernov. Naturally, this party refused to take up for discussion the completely precise, clear, unambiguous proposal of the supreme organ of Soviet power, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, to recognize the program of Soviet power, to recognize the "Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People," to recognize the October Revolution and Soviet power. In doing so, the Constituent Assembly severed all connection between itself and the Soviet Republic of Russia. The departure from such a Constituent Assembly of the Bolshevik faction and the left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who now constitute an unquestionably vast majority in the Soviets and enjoy the confidence of the workers and the majority of the peasants, was inevitable.

In fact, the party of right Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks are waging, outside the walls of the Constituent Assembly, the most desperate struggle against Soviet power, openly calling in their organs for its overthrow, denouncing as arbitrary and lawless the force necessary on the part of the toiling classes, through the agency of the Soviets, for the suppression of the resistance of the exploiters for their liberation from exploitation, defending saboteurs in the service of capital, going so far as to make outright calls for terror, which unknown groups have already begun to carry out. It is clear that the remaining part of the Constituent Assembly could, in view of all this, play only the role of covering the struggle of counter-revolutionaries for the overthrow of Soviet power.

Therefore, the Central Executive Committee hereby decrees:

The Constituent Assembly is dissolved.